Town End, Hill Top and Beatrix Potter

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On a recommendation from Luke’s Aunt Sue, I decided to visit Hill Top, the home of Beatrix Potter.

The day before I’d been to Town End, a farm in Troutbeck, and taken a guided tour. A friend of Ms Potter’s lived at Town End and she apparently visited often, though only stayed one night. Town End has been preserved very well and the tour guide did an excellent job, sharing many interesting facts about the buildings and the family who had lived there from the 15th century to the 20th.

One of the funniest things I learned on that tour was that one of the men of the house, who did a lot of furniture carving, used to carve dates like ‘1684’ into his pieces even though he was producing them in the 19th century. This made dating the furniture quite a challenge for the National Trust staff.

There were also lots of interesting associations with modern phrases. The dining table was a giant board that had a smooth side for eating off and a rough side for doing work on. The master of the house would sit at the top of the table and he was known as the chairman of the board.

Dancing on the table was ‘treading the boards’ and games played at the table were board games. I’m not entirely sure how strong the links between these and our modern expressions are but our guide was convinced.

So then the next day I set off for Hill Top.

First I caught the ferry over from Bowness on Windermere. On the boat I met a woman and her mother from Dubbo and it turned out the woman had gone to the same high school as me.

Everyone else got off the ferry and caught the shuttle bus to Hill Top but I, despite registering the name of the place, didn’t take the obvious hint and decided to walk. Well, it wasn’t the most steep climb I’ve ever made but the walk took me through some muddy paddocks and by the time I got to the right village I was puffed and annoyed with myself.

One of the local houses.

The village that Hill Top is in is quite pretty but the density of tourists was a bit of a shock for me, having spent most of my time in the Lake District by myself. Her house was lovely though and so was the garden.

It was filled with interesting objects. My favourite was her dolls house.

A peek through the window.

There were lots of guides around to answer questions, which was nice. Even a Japanese guide. I had heard someone say that Beatrix Potter was very popular in Japan and that her books were so often used as English starter texts that Japanese people came to her house like pilgrims. Maybe someone who reads this can confirm or deny?

After sneaking aboard the shuttle back to the pier then catching the ferry back over I was left with half a day to fill. I noticed a bit of a hill behind Bowness and wandered up through the back streets until I finally ended up on Brant Fell. The views were lovely (surprise surprise) and I sat there and ate my elegant repast of a piece of pita bread, a tiny piece of cheese, a hard boiled egg and some cherry tomatoes.

Classy!

I had a chat to a guy who jogged to the top but then looked kind of like he was going to die. My conversations with random people have fallen into a pretty standard pattern. First I tell them I’m from Melbourne, they tell me they have relations in Perth. Then we both express amazement at how incredibly good the weather has been for the last fortnight then it diverges into discussions about cultural differences between Australia and the UK.

I don’t think I ever think about my Australianess when I am at home but when I am overseas, particularly in the UK or US, I spend a lot of time either dispelling or reinforcing stereotypes, depending on what mood I’m in.

Anyhoo, I shall leave you with this serendipitous floral/sign arrangement and start a post about today’s walk. Then I shall be all caught up, hooray!

Bowness On Windermere

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I am heading to Cambridge on Saturday so I decided to have a few nights of luxury at a B&B called The Rum Doodle. Ridiculous.

I dropped off my big bag in the morning and then wandered down the main strip of shops. I found a pub to sit and write a few postcards in – The Hole In ‘T Wall.

Sometimes you go into these places and think that if anyone tried to copy the interior and set it up in another country as a traditional English Pub people would tell them to dial it back a bit.

I don’t envy whoever has to dust the place, anyhow.

I bought a couple of second hand books that I can easily leave behind somewhere. The first I’m reading is called ‘The Life of a Scilly Sergeant’ and it’s true stories written by a policeman who was posted to the Isles of Scilly. It’s quite good and reminds me a lot of small towns I’ve lived in. Mum, I think you’d like it.

I had a look in the local church, mainly because it was a little oasis from the noisy bus loads of tourists who clog the local footpaths.

The inside was lovely, with a pice of stained glass that was from the 13th century and hand-painted walls that looked like tiles in some places.

There was a comfortable homeliness to the place that larger, more ostentatious churches lack.

Next I went to the movies and even though I enjoyed the film (I Feel Pretty) I was most tickled by the size of the theatre and screen. There was no way the screen was more than twice as big as our home tv and the elaborate curtains that initially covered it had a real Muppets feel.

Hopefully the exit sign on the side can help you gauge the size.

The theatre itself – nothing about it felt like it had altered since the 60s, even the staff.

After the movie I went to the Indian restaurant next door and had a korma and coconut rice before power-walking back to the Rum Doodle in the rain. I had been wondering if I’d squandered the money I’d spent on my room and should’ve gone camping instead, but when I saw the bath tub I was reassured it had all been worthwhile. All I’ve wanted for two weeks was a soak in a tub – something I do about once a decade at home. Then the bed! So fluffy! So full of springs and so not a blow up or foam mattress!

Like sleeping in a slightly creaky cloud.

My least active day of the whole trip so far but it was nice to read, watch some light entertainment and finally get in a curry. Is it just me or are Thai restaurants taking over from Indian in the UK? I have no problem with Thai food but it seems to outnumber Indian 3-1 everywhere I’ve been so far. Times change, I suppose!

An Unexpectedly Long Hike

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I set off from the YHA in Troutbeck with a determination to walk at least 15km and picked a trail that headed up the valley then circled around the top and came back. I really need to put more planning and thinking into the walks I improvise because, as I go along, I keep changing my mind about how far I want to go and where. I keep thinking that a highlighter would be useful so I can keep track of which track I meant to stay on. Not that it matters too much, I suppose, as long as I know where I am.

I walked along the valley floor, enjoying the sun and the fact that, despite it being a sunny weekend, I couldn’t see a soul – except high on the ridges of Ill Bell and the other peaks along the Kentmere Horseshoe. I like looking up and seeing the little silhouettes of people trudging along.

I crossed this rather prehistoric looking bridge and wished the water was warmer. It always looks so clear and inviting!

I walked through a farm then the bog began and didn’t really stop for the rest of the walk. I looked at the maps and decided I wanted to climb up and out of the valley. The walls weren’t that steep and I saw that the Kirkstone Inn wasn’t terribly far and I could possibly even make it there for lunch if I was willing to climb a few stone walls and do some navigating. So I did!

As I climbed up the side I saw a herd of wild deer on a spot very appropriately named Hart’s Crag. See if you can spot them in this appallingly zoomed-in photo.

I stopped about ten times on the way up. I don’t think I’ve ever climbed anything so steep! When I got to the top there was a wall to climb, then rocks to negotiate around, then I finally saw another person, walking right where I expected the path to be. He confirmed my location and so I drank the last of my water and headed along the path.

I took my picture at a cairn then headed down to the inn. It was after 3 and I prayed the whole way down that it was still doing food as I hadn’t brought any.

I can’t remember feeling less guilty about eating so many chips.

My adventures weren’t over though. I left the inn, thinking I’d walked the four or five kilometres back to Troutbeck by road so I could put the map away. It didn’t take long for me to get sick of the cars whizzing past to look for an alternative. I struck out across a field to climb over the back of Wansfell but it was less a field and more a thinly-disguised pond. My feet were sinking in up to the ankles. I was unimpressed. Still, I waded up the hill and was rewarded with great views that don’t really look like much on screen. Trust me, it was lovely.

As I neared the hostel I checked my distance walked – 22kms/13 miles. My longest day yet, and most of it up or down. I have no trouble walking much further distances when it’s flat but the hills really kill me. I’m probably getting fitter but it’s such a gradual process that I’ll only really notice when I get home and bound up a walk that is normally challenging. Well, that’s the hope, anyway.

Look at this high-tech masterwork below! The yellow is when I was on a proper path and the red bit is where I scrambled up the hill. It won’t mean much to many people but it was fun tracing my journey.

The thing that really surprised me was how much energy I had on the home stretch and that my feet didn’t hurt at all. In the middle of crowing about it to Luke the next morning I realised I’d cut my foot open and was bleeding on the hostel floor. Murphy’s Law, I suppose.

The Lake District: Snapshots and a Bit of Moaning

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I’ve not really properly written about much that I’ve done in the last five days that I didn’t do with Deb and Pete, so there’s a lot to write about but I’m also forgetting the details, so don’t panic, this won’t go on for thousands of words. Probably.

My last day in Keswick I geared up to keep going on the Cumbria Way. The forecast had been for strong winds that would be really bad on the peaks but I figured I wouldn’t be on the peaks so I’d be ok. Turned out I was wrong.

Ready to face the elements! Almost.

I skipped the first four km out of town (I’d already walked them on a previous day and it was all uphill) and caught a taxi to the parking area behind Latrigg. I got going fairly quickly after the first kilometre – I always stop and rearrange my straps and anything else that isn’t sitting quite right – then rounded a corner to head up a long, exposed north-south valley. Well, the wind felt like it was going to pick me up and throw me over the edge. I looked along the path, which had a fairly steep drop on one side and mud and running water covering quite a bit of what was flat, and decided to turn back. I am still not sure if I did the right thing, although the winds were later described as ‘gale force’. It would’ve been a miserable day if I’d kept going and I wouldn’t have enjoyed one bit of it. However I saw people walking and on bikes going in the same direction or onto higher paths and I wonder if it would’ve all been so bad. Still, I was by myself with no one to sound an alarm if I did hurt myself so better to play it safe.

On the way back into Keswick, feeling quite defeated, I passed a field where I watched (and videoed – check my Instagram feed ‘zenandtheart‘) two tiny lambs chase a goose around and then the goose chase them back. It went on for a couple of minutes and was completely charming.

I realised, when I got back to Keswick, that I had the key card for my YHA room still in my pocket, so I took that back and decided to head for Windermere, on the basis that it was a reasonable point from which to reach other places.

I caught the wonderful 555 bus that loops around the lakes and is a quite an experience in itself (as was trying to quickly get down from the top floor with my gigantic pack on my back) and on the trip I realised that the Windermere YHA is actually in Troutbeck, which is a little earlier. The YHA is also a good kilometre’s walk uphill from the main road, a generally unpleasant walk along a narrow road with lots of oncoming cars and blackberry canes poking out into the road. There was only one highlight – the sight of this doorway and stairs, which led to a field but had obviously once been part of something much more grand and looked like a tiny snippet of a Game of Thrones set.

The YHA in Troutbeck is a strange building. It is entirely made of cement but has a slightly Art Deco/institutional feel. There’s lots of comfy couches and a decent cooking area and almost right up until the end I really enjoyed my time there.

The second to last night made me realise how extraordinarily fortunate I had been in my room mates to date. The first of that evening’s companions was an older lady who was that sort of person who thinks of themselves as ‘no nonsense’ and can’t be in a room without making noise and harrumphing and trying to make eye contact because they are certain you want to know what they are harrumphing at.

I had been lying on my bunk, casually reading, when she came in and immediately leapt up onto the wide windowsills and tried to open all the windows to their full extent “I get so hot you see! My head just boils! It’s a medical condition I have!” (Menopause, I assume) “And these places! You can never open the windows properly because of OH&S! It’s SO HOT,” I gazed bemusedly at this as the weather was about 14 degrees and I commented that, being Australian, I perhaps didn’t feel the ‘heat’ in the same way. Cue ten minutes of her opinions about Australia and Australians (mostly positive) and relating her trips to Australia etc etc. then she started asking me about the light fittings. “When you turn the lights off at night, are these lights green?”

You can imagine my confusion.

“It’s just that, at every hostel I go to, they have these green safety lights! It’s awful! It’s all this OH&S gone mad! The last one was SO BRIGHT! I just couldn’t sleep at all!” I suggested she wear a sleeping mask but of course that wouldn’t work because she moved around too much in her sleep and it would be TOO HOT. Christ. Anyhow, I escaped with my iPad to have dinner downstairs.

The dining area has the most magnificent view.

The other occupants of the room seemed relatively unassuming and appropriately friendly. However one came into the room quite late and turned on her bedside light for over an hour and came and went several times, letting the door slam behind her as she went. Every time the door slammed The Harrumpher loudly cursed to make it clear to the rest of us that Bad Manners were being noted. This was far more annoying and disruptive than the door noise and introduced, to my mind, a note of tension to the room. I put in my ear plugs and covered my eyes but then lady #3 started snoring. The snoring was epic. It was not entirely rhythmic. It was verging on criminal. I think, through my earplugs, I heard the sound of a book being thrown and I did not move, just lay there wishing myself to sleep. It must’ve eventually worked because I woke at 6, all plans of going on a long uphill hike round at least part of the Kentmere Horseshoe quite ruined.

The next afternoon I asked for a new bed or said I was happy to camp – anything to be out of that room once I realised my companions were here again. Fortunately a spare bed was available – in a room ENTIRELY TO MYSELF! So swings and roundabouts, I suppose.

It did make me long for the privacy and convenience of my tent again, so tomorrow I’m off to camp elsewhere and hopefully it’ll be somewhere quiet!

Keswick With Friends

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Everyone says travelling alone is good because you can do what you like, when you like, but it also means having no one to bounce ideas off, or get inspiration from and I was kind of missing company after the first ten days.

I ended up staying a few extra nights in Keswick due to friends from Australia happening to be there at the same time, hooray!

Look at these two larrikins!

Pete and Deb will be familiar faces to anyone who was in, or has been following, the Africa videos that Luke is (FINALLY) finishing and posting now from our trip five years ago. We met Deb and Pete on our Dragoman Tour and have seen them in Melbourne a few times since. They were top value on the trip then (I’m not just saying that because you are reading this, thanks very much Pete) and I had an excellent few days hanging out with them in Keswick.

We had dinner two nights in a row then on the last day we walked to Castlerigg stone circle then did a bit of orienteering around the countryside, looking desperately for scones but finding nothing. I don’t mean we were looking for scones like you’d look for mushrooms btw, I means we were looking for a cafe. We found one that was shut and one that, despite several signs promising cake had not a whit.

Pete looking like a little hiker-gnome having a nap in a field, much to the bemusement of two walkers in the next field.

Over the course of the time we enjoyed dinner at the following three establishments: The Royal Oak, The Dog and Gun, and Wainwrights. The first was the fanciest, the second had the most character and the third had the best steak and ale pie I’ve yet eaten.

It doesn’t look fancy but it tasted amazing!

What kind of onion do these rings come from??

Even though I’ve spent a lot of time talking to people in the last few weeks it was a real pleasure to talk to people I had shared experiences with and who knew people I knew.

Pete and Deb had come over to do some walking but also to attend the book launch of Steve, our tour guide on the African trip. They planned to surprise Steve so I hadn’t been able to post about seeing them therefore I took a bit of a break from blogging that had absolutely nothing to do with me feeling lazy or starting an excellent new book.

After working in Africa, a few years ago Steve went to lead tours in South America and was involved in a road accident in which people died. He was sent to prison, despite the fact that it had not been his fault – the other vehicle had swerved across the road during the night. He ended up with dreadful injuries and spent months in prison in Ecuador. When he eventually returned to the UK he wrote a book. His website is at http://www.steviewhitesworld.com if anyone is interested in reading more. He also posts stories about the crazy and funny things he has seen as a tour guide around the world.

More (not very) crazy and (almost) funny things that have happened on my travels in the next update!